


Exposure Therapy

by dabbling_dood



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Human/Monster Romance, M/M, Naga Bill Cipher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24711709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dabbling_dood/pseuds/dabbling_dood
Summary: In a perfect world, Bill would tangle every available inch of himself around Dipper, but the world is not perfect.  Dipper would react about as calmly as he did when Bill first sprang out of the trees, dragged him back to his burrow, and asked where he got Stanford Pines’ journal.(Bill is an ambush predator.  So sue him.)~Prequel toAnaconda, but can be read independently.
Relationships: Bill Cipher/Dipper Pines
Comments: 14
Kudos: 216





	Exposure Therapy

**Author's Note:**

> Pro tip: instead of outlining a story before you write it, incorporate a plot structure into it at the last minute. Loads of frustration for the whole family!  
> Anyway, enjoy the character exploration. You can thank my girlfriend, who beta read this and kicked my perfectionist tendencies in the ass. Love you, sugar snap!

“Y’sure you’re okay?” Bill asks. 

Dipper’s reply is thin and short, like his breath on Bill’s collarbone. “Yeah. Fine.”

The kid is determined, Bill will give him that. He would point out the barely-there tremor in Dipper’s frame, but Dipper might quit this little exercise if he gets irritated enough. Bill is going to keep Dipper tucked against him as long as he can, thank you very much.

See, Sixer? He can keep his mouth shut with the right incentive.

(Maybe if Ford had introduced Bill to his nephew back in the day—no, never mind. That would’ve ended with one less Pine Tree in the forest. Dipper thinks Bill has poor impulse control _now_ , but in his adolescence…yikes. Bill is lucky Ford only naga-proofed his house after their falling-out, rather than outright killing him.)

When Bill leans to the left to retrieve the knapsack Dipper hung from a nearby tree branch, the thick limb supporting their weight creaks. Dipper’s grip on him tightens. The hitch in his breathing blends in with the rustling leaves and distant birdsongs, but he’s pressed so close that Bill can feel it.

Maybe this isn’t the best place for exposure therapy. Bill has spent half his life woven among tree branches, picking twigs and leaves out of his ratty blond ponytail, but humans are probably more comfortable on the ground.

“Relax, kid,” Bill says, pulling Ford’s journal out of Dipper’s knapsack. “No self-respecting snake has ever fallen out of a tree.”

Dipper snorts. “‘Self-respecting’?”

Bill recoils, blinking rapidly. “Yes, self-respecting!”

He can feel Dipper’s muscles relaxing already, settling into the easy rhythm of their mutual ribbing. There’s no way he’s forgotten about the tail wound around his calf, but he’s not kicking and screaming, either.

In a perfect world, Bill would tangle every available inch of himself around Dipper, but the world is not perfect. Dipper would react about as calmly as he did when Bill first sprang out of the trees, dragged him back to his burrow, and asked where he got Stanford Pines’ journal.

(Bill is an ambush predator. So sue him.)

Bill flips to the journal page titled _Naga_ , lovingly illustrated with drawings of a lanky young naga the length of a school bus. He jabs a finger at a portrait in the corner. “Look at that face and tell me I don’t have self-respect!”

“Your teeth are too big for your mouth,” Dipper replies without missing a beat.

“The better to smile with, my dear!”

“Yeah, I bet it looked real charming with bits of squirrel stuck in your teeth. Great Uncle Ford should’ve drawn a tail hanging out of your mouth, right here, and some feathers over here…”

“Aw, cut me some slack! My species doesn’t operate on _social niceties._ If nagas were friendlier, there’d be more of us around, y’know, reproducing. Oh, here’s a fun fact! You can tell how much a naga gets laid by how much they talk!”

Dipper lets out a startled laugh. “ _What?_ ”

“Ask a naga a simple question, and—assuming they don’t eat your face off—you either get a monologue or a monosyllabic answer. It’s either all talk or no talk, no middle ground.”

“And who gets laid more?”

“The ones that talk less.” When Dipper laughs, Bill insists, “They do! They get right to the point instead of chatting for two hours and finding out they’re not so compatible after all. The chatty ones flirt, play games…you know, like humans. But the quiet ones… You wanna know what it sounds like when the quiet ones hit on you?”

“Let’s hear it.”

Bill pulls his best straight face, voice flat. “Col’soon. Makin’ knots?”

Dipper blinks at him. “What?”

“It’s… Right, the dialect. ‘It’ll be cold soon. You makin’ knots with anybody?’” Bill rephrases, waggling his brows. Dipper squints like he’s comparing two puzzle pieces. “Making knots. To keep warm. Getting tangled up together and…”

“ _Oh_.” Dipper snickers into Bill’s shoulder, but he jumps to the next thing before Bill can decide whether an affectionate squeeze would spook him. “Do you guys usually group together during the winter? Do you hibernate together?”

“We don’t hibernate, kid. Some nagas like to pair up over the winter, though. Sometimes they stick with the same partner or partners every year, and sometimes they hook up with whoever catches their eye. Depends on the naga.”

“Huh. You said the, uh, the ‘ _col’soon’_ thing was a dialect, right? Do the quiet ones use that?”

“Nah, it’s a naga thing. Well, actually, it could be local. I dunno.” Bill shifts his tail on reflex, and Dipper twitches, a gasp hissing in through his teeth. Bill stills. “Whoops. Sorry, kid.”

“S’okay,” Dipper mumbles. He’s buried his face in the crook of Bill’s neck.

All of Bill’s instincts are rioting against his self control, bargaining for any excuse to squeeze this warm, wonderful little meat-sack even closer. Close contact soothes him, right? So if Bill wraps them both up, Dipper will…have a panic attack, probably.

Bill grimaces. This exposure therapy crap had better work.

~

Some time ago, Dipper dug a pair of walkie-talkies out of Bill’s sprawling collection of matchboxes, billiards balls, dentures, padlocks, and lava lamps; taxidermied animals, Summerween decorations, and cutlery ranging from decorative spoons to plastic sporks; compasses, pacifiers, and things Bill can’t even name.

(Dipper calls it a pile of junk. Dipper is _blind_.)

After taking the walkie-talkies home overnight, Dipper returned one to Bill and explained that radio communication calls for certain protocols. When you finish talking, you’re supposed to say “over”. That’s all well and good, but it breaks up the rhythm of the long, meandering monologues Bill likes to give when Dipper isn’t responding.

This afternoon’s monologue is about how Bill’s mother ate his father when he was a child, and Bill followed her example by eating his two siblings—at least, that’s what Dear Old Mom told him, and she could’ve eaten them herself, honestly—but he never did it again because cannibalism isn’t popular with nagas, even the ones who think humans are a decent food source, which Bill doesn’t, by the way, not since that toddler _screamed in his FREAKING ear_ twenty years ago, and _especially_ not since he borrowed Ford’s old microbiology textbook, which told him that humans have _prions_ and prions cause _laughing disease_ and laughing disease is _not_ the good time that its name advertises!

When the rhythmic vibrations of Dipper’s hiking boots carry through the cave, Bill abandons his walkie-talkie and the shiny rack of auto parts he’s been rearranging. Up through the tunnel, past the last patches of bioluminescent moss, Bill flings his human half at Dipper. Dipper almost falls over. He retaliates by swatting Bill with the book he’s carrying.

It’s not Ford’s journal, for once, but a book of logic puzzles. Dipper goes through a wordy spiel about keeping himself distracted while they do the exposure thing, which basically means Bill hasn’t been distracting enough. Fine. He can take it up a notch.

“Seventeen,” Bill says, tapping a half-filled grid of numbers.

Dipper sends him a sideways look from his seat on the biggest stuffed toy in Bill’s nest. Bill’s tail is wrapped around his legs up to his thighs. “You can’t use two-digit numbers, Bill.”

“Sure you can! Put the one here and the seven here.”

“That’s not how Sudoku works.”

“Just write down the numbers, Pine Tree. We both know I’m the brains of this operation.”

“Seriously?” Dipper snorts, only to squawk when Bill swipes his pencil. “Dude!”

Dipper jerks the book out of Bill’s reach, grabbing for the pencil, but he can’t move his legs enough to keep his balance. He wobbles and falls across Bill’s lap. Bill takes the opportunity to snag the book.

Dipper makes an indignant noise. “No, no, no!”

While Bill gleefully scribbles numbers into the grid, Dipper latches onto his writing arm. He uses it to haul himself upright, which turns the three under Bill’s pencil into an elongated squiggle. Bill shakes his arm free. His handwriting improves slightly as he leans away from the meat-sack currently latched onto him like a frantic, foul-mouthed octopus.

“Son of a _bitch_! You glorified pipe cleaner!”

Bill responds with a startled shout of laughter. _“Pipe cleaner?”_

Dipper makes a garbled noise, stretches out as far as he can, and catches a corner of the book. Bill yanks his legs out from under him. Dipper goes down with a shout.

For a full three seconds, Bill scribbles numbers uninterrupted. By the time those three seconds pass, though, the rush of mischief has dwindled to a queasy flutter. Dipper is rigid. One of his hands grips tight to the tail wrapped around his thighs. The other clings to Bill’s waist. He hasn’t tried to sit up again, but lies in Bill’s lap with his face hidden and his muscles drawn tight.

Bill drops the book. “Shit.”

He hastily releases Dipper’s legs. Dipper scrambles away from the retreating coils as Bill pulls him upright.

“Shit, shit, I’m sorry, kid, I forgot…”

“It’s okay,” Dipper says stiffly, but his face says it’s not. Bill reaches for him, rethinks it, and digs through the pile of cushions for the book he dropped instead.

“That’s enough exposure for one day.” Bill holds out the book and pencil.

Taking a deep breath in and out, Dipper accepts them, folding his legs. “Yeah.”

As Dipper flips through the book, Bill picks at his claws. Their shoulders are pressed together, but compared to the contact from earlier, they might as well have three feet between them.

Dipper finds his page and flips the pencil around to use the eraser. He pauses, squinting at the puzzle. “Wait. Are these right?”

Bill glances at his work. “You sound surprised.”

“I thought you were just messing around,” Dipper huffs, nudging Bill with his elbow.

“Messing around? Me? It’s like you don’t know me at all, kid!”

Dipper stays for a while longer, but he doesn’t snuggle up with Bill again.

~

“How long have you had these?” Dipper asks a few days later.

Bill looks up from a stack of video cassettes. Dipper has been picking through them with a smile that looks vaguely patronizing. He keeps shaking his head and laughing to himself.

“I dunno,” Bill says, shrugging. “A decade, maybe?”

Dipper snickers and shakes his head again. The size of Bill’s collection doesn’t impress him anymore, but now and then Bill brings out a pile of goodies to sort, and Dipper spots something he likes. Electronics usually do the trick.

“Is the case for _The Shining_ over there? It got mixed up with, uh…” Dipper checks the cover of the case in his hand, snorts, and holds it up to show Bill. “… _The Little Mermaid._ ”

Bill quirks a brow at the sparkle-infested cartoon illustration, decorated with a gaudy golden title. “Uh, I dunno. Is _The Shining_ that shiny, too?”

“It’s a horror movie,” Dipper tells him, crawling over Bill’s tail toward the shopping cart full of tapes. He falters when Bill shifts his tail out of the way. The reaction doesn’t last more than half a second, but Bill sees it anyway.

Bill swipes the case for _The Little Mermaid_ and scans the back to distract himself. “This gets kinda dark, too. I like the part where she gets her tongue cut out.”

“Not in the Disney version, Bill.”

Bill wrinkles his nose. “What?”

“Disney movies are a lot more kid-friendly than the original fairy tales,” Dipper says. “They… _The Shining!_ Here we go.”

“What’s not kid-friendly about fairy tales?” Bill presses, throwing up his hands.

Dipper gives him a look as he switches the video cassettes. “Cutting out people’s tongues?”

“Come on, you can’t change that part of the story! The whole point is that she can’t talk!”

“She still loses her voice, but the witch does some kind of, uh, _magical_ stuff that doesn’t involve cutting off tongues.”

“Oh, come on! If you’re gonna water it down, you might as well change the whole story! Pain-free legs! The mermaid hooks up with the prince!” Bill scoffs.

Dipper thins his lips and picks through the cassettes, painfully silent.

Bill gapes. “ _No_.”

“And they all lived happily ever after,” Dipper drawls, waving the movie at him. Bill smacks the cheerful monstrosity out of his hand.

“That is _bullshit!_ Why would they take out the good parts? The story is already short on murder!”

“If it makes you feel any better, they stab Ursula with a ship.”

“Who the hell is Ursula?”

Shaking his head, Dipper takes out his phone, dials, and passes it to Bill. “Ask Mabel.”

Bill asks Mabel. She puts on the movie at home and gives him a play-by-play while she watches, so that he can listen to her sing along with the soundtrack. Dipper puts her on speakerphone. Apparently, Bill’s outrage is amusing.

Around the time the sea witch bursts into song, Dipper stops digging through the video tapes and stretches out next to Bill. Bill meets Dipper’s poorly-hidden smirk with a glare.

“ _’Kay, so now, her throat is glowing,”_ Mabel narrates over the music, _“and the smoky magic hands are pulling the glow-y thing out of her mouth_.”

“Her vocal cords?” Bill says hopefully.

_“No, just her voice! It’s magic!”_

Groaning, Bill flops on top of his coils. “That’s such a cop-out!”

_“Shush, this part’s important!”_

Bill wrinkles his nose at Dipper, who shrugs innocently. At least, it would look innocent if not for the grin on his face. Bill is about to push him over when Dipper scoots closer and leans against Bill’s coils.

It’s a slow process, like testing the strength of a foothold. Bill doesn’t twitch a muscle. An instinctual part of him zeroes in on Dipper for the opportunity to strike, even if that just means pulling him close and soaking in his warmth. As Dipper mirrors his posture, he catches Bill’s eye.

Bill blinks. He flashes a smile—hopefully one that doesn’t look too predatory—and Dipper relaxes a little more. Over the phone, Mabel narrates a scene with the prince.

Somewhere in the middle of the climactic scene (The witch has a plot to steal the throne, now? Really?) Dipper’s eyes start to flutter. He hasn’t moved from Bill’s tail, and all the tension has leaked out of him. By the end of the movie, he’s out cold.

_“Whatcha think?”_ Mabel asks over the phone. Bill responds with a long groan. _“Oh, come on, Bill.”_

“Nope. This thing signed its own death certificate when it skipped the part with the tongue.”

_“At least admit the music is good.”_

Bill huffs. “You really wanna know what I think?”

_“What’s that?”_

“I think,” he begins, and then he taps the “end call” button. He can almost hear the cry of outrage all the way from the Mystery Shack.

Grinning to himself, Bill nudges the phone toward Dipper. The kid doesn’t stir. Drool glistens at the corner of his mouth. Bill leans against his tail with a sigh, watching Dipper’s eyes twitch beneath his eyelids.

He looks so relaxed. It brings out an ache rooted so deeply in Bill’s core that he sometimes mistakes it for hunger, or thirst, or arousal. Glancing at the burrow entrance, Bill shuffles close enough for what would have been his legs to press alongside Dipper’s.

Dipper doesn’t stir when Bill’s hand settles on top of his, although his fingers twitch. A grasping reflex, probably. An unconscious attempt to pull Bill closer, optimistically. Bill smiles to himself and closes his eyes.

When Bill tumbles back into the waking world, it’s because the nearest heat source shifted away from him. He tucks it closer with a grunt. The thing wriggles, and this time, Bill feels it sliding free of his tail. He tightens his grip on reflex.

There’s a gasp, and then a tight voice. “Bill. _Bill_.”

A hand taps an urgent rhythm against Bill’s arm until he drags his eyes open, groaning quietly. His surroundings slowly come into focus. Stacks of video cassettes. The smell of Dipper’s hair. Bill can feel Dipper’s breath, short and shallow on his collarbone, and rigid muscles against his tail.

“Oh.” Bill lifts his arm off of Dipper. It gives him a good view of the coils keeping Dipper pressed against him. His stomach drops. “ _Oh_. Crap, I…”

“Bill,” Dipper hisses again. It’s a plea.

Bill starts to untangle them, but he hesitates. Dipper isn’t exactly kicking and screaming, and he’s so warm, like he was made to slot between Bill’s ribs. Bill puts his hand on Dipper’s arm.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Bill says, slow and calm. “You know that, right?”

Dipper squirms impatiently. “I know.”

“It’s just my tail, Pine Tree. Just part of my body.”

“Bill, let go.”

“Like a leg or a foot or—”

_“I know!”_

Dipper won’t meet Bill’s eye, and his hands are starting to shake. Bill loosens his grip. Scrambling upright, Dipper shoves away from the coils, which Bill gathers around himself.

As Dipper’s breathing slows, he pats his pockets. Bill wordlessly holds out his cell phone. Dipper stretches as far as he can to take it without getting closer.

Eventually, he fixes a stern look on Bill. “Don’t do that.”

“I was out cold,” Bill mumbles. “I didn’t realize…”

“I meant,” Dipper interrupts him, “when I tell you to let go, you have to let me go.”

Bill stares at his lap. “I thought…I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Dipper doesn’t respond to that. When he leaves, he doesn’t take any of the video tapes with him, saying he doesn’t have a VHS player. Bill stacks them back into the cart by himself.

~

At night, Bill has a dream about strangling all the characters from the _Little Mermaid_ movie. He cuts out their tongues and delivers them to an old woman with the tail of an eel, and she cackles into her wild white hair. In exchange, she gives him a pair of legs.

The “legs” look a lot like pants, and Bill wears them on his tail like pants, but Dipper seems convinced when he sees them, and that’s all that matters.

“Sure, I’d love to get tangled up with you and your new legs,” Dream Dipper says. “By the way, I misplaced my shirt.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dream Bill replies, wrapping them up together.

“It’s kinda cold. Could you put your hand down my pants and warm me up?”

“Where _are_ your pants?”

“That’s weird. They were just here a minute ago.”

~

Bill wakes up before Dream Dipper can lose something important, like his virginity.

(Is Dipper a virgin? Eh, it doesn’t matter.)

Bill blinks up at the patches of bioluminescent moss on his ceiling, the pillow against his chest, and the loops of his tail around it. Groaning, he rolls onto his front. Maybe if he goes back to sleep, Dream Dipper will still be down to fool around.

Oh, man. Dream Dipper totally thought that putting pants on Bill’s tail was the same as Bill growing legs. Dream Dipper is an idiot. Dream _Bill_ is an idiot.

Huffing a rueful laugh into his pile of cushions, Bill pushes himself upright. His ponytail is loose and crooked. When he tries to fix it, the rubber band breaks. His life is a mess.

The end of Bill’s tail winds toward the rear wall of his burrow, where he parked the book cart he swiped from the library. He tries to guide it around the pile of Halloween costumes that Mabel went through last week, but the wheel gets caught on something.

The cart jerks to a halt. The office supplies inside it rattle. Groaning, Bill drags himself out of his nest to untangle it.

The culprit is a pair of pants—specifically, black leather pants with zippers everywhere. Bill hasn’t figured out what the zippers are for. It probably makes more sense to people with legs. Tossing the pants aside, Bill digs through the box of rubber bands in the library cart. His eyes wander back to the costume pile while he fixes his hair.

Bill glances at the burrow entrance, listening for any sort of movement in the tunnel. There’s nothing.

“Eh, what the hell,” Bill mutters, and he grabs the leather pants.

He gets about a third of his tail’s length through one leg before the seams threaten to split. It’s a hassle and a half—leather and skin don’t interact well. Even so, Bill likes the way the shiny black leather looks with his shiny gold scales, like the warning colors of venomous animals. The one empty pant leg looks a little silly, though.

He threads the end of his tail up through the ankle of the empty leg and out the waistband. The result is…something. Bill makes an experimental lap around his nest. With his tail threaded out one ankle and into the other, the pants keep him folded in half like a bobby pin. The zippers jingle.

“This seems backwards,” Bill mutters, squinting at the pant legs.

Right now, he has a kind of conjoined pseudo-foot. The pant legs should be able to move independently. Maybe if he put the pants on upside-down, so that the two ends of his body come out of the ankles instead of the waist…

Bill pulls on the waistband, careful not to punch through the leather with his claws. It doesn’t budge. Frowning, Bill pulls harder. The leather clings tight, squeezing pins and needles into his tail.

“Uh-oh,” Bill says.

~

After their little tiff, it takes some wheedling to get Dipper to answer his walkie-talkie and come back to Bill’s burrow. He sounds skeptical when Bill can’t bring himself to explain his plight beyond “I’m stuck”. When Dipper arrives, all messy hair and pajama pants, the scowl on his face warns that pranks will not be taken well. He stops short when he sees the problem.

Bill tugs miserably at the waistband of his pants. “A little help, here?”

Dream Dipper didn’t laugh at Bill’s pants. Real Dipper crumples to the ground and nearly pisses himself.

“What is…?” he wheezes, gesturing at Bill’s tail, and then he doubles over and laughs some more. “ _What?_ ”

Bill hunches his shoulders. “I got stuck,” he repeats needlessly.

“Why would you even…?” Dipper rolls onto his side and doesn’t finish the question. The last time Bill saw him laugh this hard was after Mabel and Bill ganged up to tickle him. “I can’t _bre-he-heathe!”_

“I can’t feel my tail,” Bill says sourly.

Dipper _howls_. Tears stream down his face. Bill is sorely tempted to shred the pants with his claws just so he can grab Dipper and strangle him. Grumbling to himself, Bill opens a few of the zippers in hopes of loosening things up.

Dipper drags himself closer, still giggling and red-faced. “Ha-hang on, let me see.”

Bill huffs and sits back. Instead of leaning over Bill’s trapped tail, Dipper gathers the problem into his lap. It’s a surprise, but not unwelcome. Bill does his best not to fidget. If he spooks Dipper now, he’ll have no choice but to tear the pants off.

As Dipper works the leather loose, his backpack falls to the side with a rattle. Bill unzips it, curious.

“I brought a first-aid kit,” Dipper says, “since you wouldn’t tell me what was going on.”

“I told you I wasn’t hurt,” Bill grumbles back.

“What did you think would happen? You’d grow legs or something?”

Bill scowls at the wall and mutters, “It was supposed to help with your weird tail phobia.” It’s not completely true, but it sounds better than _I knew exactly how stupid this idea was, and I did it anyway!_

Dipper’s giggles die off. Bill keeps his eyes on the wall and drowns out the silence with his own voice. “I didn’t think I’d get stuck. Sheesh, I can never find stuff in my size.”

“Bill,” Dipper says eventually, “you’re kind of an idiot.”

The end of Bill’s tail swings around to swat Dipper. Dipper jumps, and an apology rises in Bill’s throat on a wave of regret, but then Dipper starts giggling again. Bill blinks at him.

Dipper shakes his head. “Don’t give me that look. You look ridiculous.”

~

A week passes, and Dipper makes no mention of exposure therapy—not explicitly, anyway. Bill sometimes catches Dipper staring at his tail, hands fidgeting like he wants to touch. Sometimes he _does_ touch it, the way he might nudge Bill’s arm, but far too deliberate to be as casual as they pretend it is. Even if Dipper doesn’t say it out loud, he’s still acclimating himself.

Of course, it’s probably hard for Dipper to talk about that when he’s busy yammering about the stupid incident with the leather pants. When Mabel joins him for a visit to Bill’s burrow, the first thing out of her mouth is “Hey, Bill! Didja grow legs yet?”

She then launches into her plans to tailor the pants to fit him, which is one reason why Bill doesn’t hang the twins over the burrow entrance with his new staple gun.

(The other reason is the label on the staple gun, reading: “PROPERTY OF THE MYSTERY SHACK”. Bill really should remove that before Dipper sees it.)

Tailoring clothes, as it turns out, means that Bill has to sit still while Mabel takes a bunch of measurements. Dipper is supposed to be helping, but he mostly watches Bill bicker with Mabel the way Bill watches squirrels fight. Bill stops making faces at Dipper when Mabel pokes him in the ribs.

“Stop slouching,” she orders, pushing Bill’s shoulders back. “No, not like that. You’re too stiff. Just sit like you normally sit!”

“This _is_ how I normally sit!” Bill protests.

Mabel makes an animalistic sound and wraps the measuring tape around his waist for the third time. “Just stop moving around for ten seconds—Bill!”

“What?” Bill asks, still trying to reach for the loose end of the measuring tape.

Throwing up her hands, Mabel turns to her brother. “Dipper!”

Dipper offers a shrug. The laughter in his voice drowns out any semblance of sympathy. “He won’t sit still unless you give him something to do. He’s like a toddler.”

“And he’s not the least bit ashamed of that,” Bill chimes in.

With a defeated groan, Mabel tosses aside her measuring tape. “Go see if you have clothes I can take apart for scrap fabric.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Winding past Mabel’s sewing basket, Bill pulls himself up over a dresser onto a long, rocky overhang. A thin coating of dust has settled over the boxes stored up here. He sneezes when he opens one up and begins dropping articles of clothing down to the twins.

Bill opens his mouth to comment on one item in particular, but he gets distracted by a pair of careful, deliberate hands grasping the end of his tail, lifting it, fitting it to a waist until Bill curls around it on instinct—a grasping reflex. Bill hears someone climbing onto the dresser, and Dipper peeks up onto the overhang.

“I’m coming up, too,” he says, groping for a handhold in the dips and curves of the cave wall. “Don’t let me break my neck.”

Belatedly, Bill replies, “Consider your neck Cipher-insured.”

“That’s not how insurance works.”

“You told me nobody really knows how insurance works—”

Dipper stumbles on the lip of the topmost rock shelf, grabbing at the wall. Bill tightens his grip on Dipper’s waist. As Dipper recovers his footing, Bill loops another coil around his middle and pulls him inward. Dipper goes rigid. One of his hands darts to Bill’s tail.

“ _Wait_. Wait.”

Bill freezes. He starts to release Dipper’s waist, but Dipper shakes his head.

“Don’t move. Just give me a second,” he says stiffly. He hasn’t tried to get away, but stands with one hand gripping tight to the tail around him.

Bill doesn’t twitch a muscle in his body, tail or otherwise, for a full thirteen seconds. Dipper takes a deep breath in and out. As the tension in his body dwindles, so does the queasy flutter in Bill’s belly.

“Okay,” Dipper breathes, and then again: “Okay. I think I’m good.”

“You sure?” Bill’s hands won’t stop fidgeting, but he keeps his tail still.

Dipper squats down next to him, sneezes, and opens another box. “Yeah, I’m okay now. Let’s get some…” He trails off suddenly, eyes locked on the item in Bill’s hands. “Um.”

Bill looks down. “Oh, right. Hey, Shooting Star! This is pretty close to leather, right?”

Dipper jerks forward as though to stop him as Bill tosses the thing down to Mabel. It hits the ground with a rubbery slap, the bioluminescent moss leaving sharp highlights in the buckles and black latex.

“Don’t—!” Dipper blurts as Mabel reaches for the puddle of latex and pulls out a bodysuit. She drops it again with a shriek of laughter. Dipper buries his face in his hands.

Grinning, Bill leans over the ledge to gesture at the bodysuit. “I haven’t figured out what the deal is with that thing, but I’m guessing the zipper on the crotch isn’t a fashion statement.”

Mabel is too busy laughing to give Bill the juicy details about the bodysuit and the convoluted workings of human sexuality, and Dipper won’t even look at the thing. After too much teasing, Dipper climbs down from the shelf, tells Bill and Mabel never to speak to him again, and makes his way out into the tunnel.

He doesn’t go far. He still has Bill’s tail firmly attached to his waist.

~

Late one afternoon, when Bill is well into a walkie-talkie monologue about more things his mother said he did—although, again, Mama Cipher was never the most reliable source of information, especially when somebody’s kids went missing, and Bill is just starting to realize that that happened way too frequently for the tiny little hatchling colony where he grew up, which explains a lot, actually—Dipper arrives at Bill’s burrow and asks why he hasn’t been answering his walkie-talkie.

As it turns out, the batteries are dead. Bill is sure his wit was too much for them, but Dipper insists that they formed a suicide pact to escape Bill’s rambling. That is _slander_. If Dipper really thought Bill’s stories were unbearable, he wouldn’t ask him to go back over everything he told the dead walkie-talkie.

As they hunt for new batteries among the matchboxes, billiards balls, dentures, padlocks, and all that other stuff, Bill unearths a bin of pens and markers he forgot about. Naturally, sorting it becomes their new priority.

Dipper settles against Bill’s tail as he picks through the bin, kind of like he did before Bill sleep-snuggled him into a panic attack. Bill grabs a marker to distract himself…oh, ick. It’s one of those smelly ones he hates. He tests it on their scratch paper (good as new, damn it) and pretends not to be watching Dipper out of the corner of his eye.

“As I was saying,” he says, “it was all going great until I spooked that nest of pixies near the lake…”

Dipper straightens up, suddenly intent on Bill. “There’s a nest near the lake?”

“You didn’t know? The place is swarming with ‘em.”

“I knew there had to be a nest somewhere around there, but I’ve never found the thing. Where is it?”

When Bill tries to barter the information for one of the fancy new fountain pens Dipper got for his birthday, Dipper straddles his tail and grabs the smelly marker.

Bill falters. He can feel his face doing a funny little dance as his brain juggles alarm bells and fireworks, the heat of Dipper’s thighs clamped around him, the marker’s cap fire-alarm red. “What are you doing?”

Dipper pops open the marker and poises it over Bill’s tail. “Where is the pixie nest, Bill?”

It would be easy for Bill to yank his tail out from under Dipper, but he settles for saying, “You wouldn’t smear nuclear sludge on a li’l ol’ garden snake, would you?”

The marker inches closer. Bill twitches. He can smell it from here.

“Pine Tree, if you want to keep that arm…”

“You’ve got five seconds, and then I’m drawing penises all over you.”

“If you get a _speck_ of that nasty crap on me—”

Dipper spits out a rapid-fire _five-four-three-two-one_ , and Bill lunges at him. Dipper yelps out a laugh. He scoots backward—Bill can _feel_ him sliding along his tail, like he’s riding the sparks in Bill’s spine—until Bill drags his arm within reach and pries the marker from his fingers. Dipper’s eyes dart toward the plastic bin. Bill follows his gaze.

The smelly marker came in a set of twenty-four. Damn those pretty colors.

When Dipper lunges for the bin, Bill loops his tail around his thigh without thinking. Dipper goes down with a shout. Bill freezes, all playfulness dwindling to a queasy flutter. Dipper looks back with wide eyes.

And then something of a smile pulls at Dipper’s mouth. He makes another grab for the bin. Startled, Bill jerks him backward by the leg. Dipper yelps, upends the bin, and snatches at the contents as Bill drags him away from it.

“What are you _doing_?” Bill huffs, wrestling a ballpoint pen away from him.

Dipper twitches like a squirrel, but his manic smile makes it look like he expects to be tickled, not eaten. “You ready to tell me about that pixie nest, now?”

Bill glances at his tail, still wrapped around Dipper’s leg. Dipper must see the question on his face, because he shrugs.

“It’s hard to take something seriously when you’ve seen it defeated by leather pants.”

The ensuing scuffle leaves both Bill and Dipper covered in crude drawings. Dipper complains that he’ll have to take another shower today, but it’s not long before he stretches out next to Bill again. ~~~~

~

“You’re _really_ sure you’re okay?” Bill asks.

There’s a nervous undercurrent in Dipper’s reply, like the occasional skip of his heartbeat under Bill’s cheek. “I’m fine. This is kinda gay, that’s all.”

Bill has to take a second to reassess the situation. He could point out that they’ve taken a nap together once before, but Dipper might change his mind about getting Bill’s tail involved in today’s cuddle session if that incident comes up. Bill is going to stay wrapped up with Dipper for as long as possible, thank you very much.

“You think this is the gayest thing we’ve ever done?” Bill says instead, squeezing his tail around their waists. Dipper’s breath hitches, but he doesn’t ask Bill to give him space. He’s been doing that less and less, lately.

“Well, no,” Dipper hedges. He starts to pick leaves out of Bill’s ponytail before stopping himself. “It’s just… I dunno. Forget it.”

“If gay stuff gives you the willies, there’s this thing called exposure therapy…”

“I’m fine with gay stuff,” Dipper huffs.

“I’m just asking the question, kid! First you’re worried about my tail, and then you’re worried about gay stuff… You know my tail isn’t my dick, right? Is that why you think cuddling is gay all of a sudden? You’re getting dick overload?”

Dipper huffs again and digs something out of his knapsack, jostling Bill. “Go to sleep. I’m gonna read.”

Bill pats Dipper down to check for stray penises, and Dipper swats him with a well-loved paperback, laughing.

“Is it the arms? We don’t have to hug if it’s too gay for you.” Bill lets go of Dipper’s middle and leans back as far as he can without loosening his coils or falling out of the tree. “There. No homo, dude. I can feel your dick, dude, no homo.”

Dipper blanches, looking down at himself. “Oh, god, I’m so sorry—”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding!” Bill interrupts, reeling Dipper back in. “Take it easy, Pine Tree. Your dick isn’t clawing its way out of your pants.”

Slumping back into the embrace, Dipper swats Bill with the book again. Bill squeezes the breath out of Dipper with his arms. As they settle down, Dipper’s heart slows to a steady rhythm. It’s not long before he starts fiddling with Bill’s ponytail again. The end of Bill’s tail fidgets around Dipper’s ankle. Bill hears Dipper’s heart skitter and jump, but Dipper makes no complaint.

They’re so _close_ , as close as it gets. Somehow, Bill’s instincts are still rioting for any excuse to squeeze this warm, wonderful little meat-sack even closer. Dipper already thinks this is gay, right? So if Bill hits on him more obviously than usual, Dipper will…

Bill licks his lips. “Col’soon,” he says.

The fingers in Bill’s hair pause, and then Dipper snorts. “Bill, it’s summer.”

…Dipper will not get it. Stupid culture gap.

Bill has mastered the art of tap-dancing around the truth, but there aren’t many ways left to flirt that he could pass off as a joke in the event that Dipper rejects him. He can’t bump up the physical displays of affection much further. The gifts haven’t gotten the message across, either. The way this is going, Bill might have to deal with his aversion to genuine, bald-faced honesty.

Bill grimaces. This exposure therapy crap had better work on snakes.

**Author's Note:**

> Again, this wouldn't have seen the light of day without my girlfriend's feedback. The endless revision had to end somewhere. I hope you guys had fun reading it.


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